[PRINCE] BIOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF CANADIAN WATERS 89 
in Canada in the proportion that the commercial demand and market 
value increase. 
The ‘saw-dust versus fisheries’ question has been one of the most 
thorny problems faced by the Dominion Government during many years. 
Ex cathedrâ opinions were not wanting, but no accurate experiments had 
ever been carried out to reveal the actual facts, until Professor Knight, 
of Queen’s University, Kingston, tackled the much-debated question. 
Professor Knight, during the whole history of the Biological Station, 
has been continuously at work, carrying on researches of the highest 
moment to the fisheries of the Dominion, and the complex saw-dust 
question was only one of these. The three reports either already 
published, or now being published, by the Government, will afford a basis 
for future public policy on the matter. But other hardly less pressing 
fishery questions have occupied Professor Knight as a member of the. 
Biological Station’s staff. He has tested the results of dynamite in 
pollack and cod fishing, a nefarious method which United States 
poachers, and Canadians following their evil example, have illegally 
adopted in Bay of Fundy waters. Its destructive wastefulness is 
established by Dr. Knight’s experiments, carried out at some bodily 
peril, and requiring unwonted skill and care. Further, the same gifted 
‘worker tried the effects of various lobster traps designed to permit the 
undersized examples to escape, and last year he tested practically the 
merits of frozen, fresh, and of salted bait, in view of the controversy 
carried on by fishermen all along the coast when the Government-aided 
bait freezers were inaugurated to assist them in months of bait scarcity. 
Jarge numbers of fishermen had stigmatized these bait freezers as a 
doubtful boon. The lengthy investigations of Professor Macallum, 
while they have their practical side, too, are of profound interes from 
the physiological and technical, as well as the higher theoretical and 
philosophical point of view, and his “ Chemistry of Medusae ” researches 
are a notable addition to the original work of Canadian biologists. The 
“ Further Contributions to Canadian Biology ” now in the press, include 
this paper in a brief popular form; but the original memoir, giving the 
detailed analyses, must be consulted in the Journal of Physiology, Vol. 
XXIV. There is such a fascination about Professor Macallum’s results 
that I cannot forbear stating that they demonstrate specific chemical, 
as well as morphological, and anatomical distinctions between species 
of jelly-fishes ; an independence of sea-water environment; and a power 
of selective preference for the salts of sea-water, which are most striking; 
and, lastly, the inorganic composition of these lowly and simply 
organised creatures, almost the simplest of Metazoa, reflects the com- 
position of the water, not of the oceans of to-day, but of past geological 
